As more and more sophisticated mobile devices compete for supremacy in the electronics arena, manufacturers can now enable handheld devices such as mobile phones to support multimedia streaming content. A key standard in this technology is the DVB-H standard, which can transmit digital television signals and Internet services. An additional error correction scheme is also introduced to prevent reception problems that may occur in certain environments. This additional error correction scheme is known as multi-protocol-encapsulation forward-error-correction (MPE-FEC).
Please refer to FIG. 1. FIG. 1 is a DVB-H receiver 100 according to the related art. The DVB-H receiver 100 comprises a tuner 110, a base-band receiver 120, an on-chip memory (embedded memory) 130, and a backend system 140. The base-band receiver 120 is utilized for receiving a data stream, extracting data bytes of an MPE-FEC frame, storing the extracted data bytes to the on-chip memory 130, and performing Reed-Solomon (RS) decoding on the MPE-FEC frame in order to forward error correct the data.
In general, RS decoding of an MPE-FEC frame is performed in four stages. Once an entire MPE-FEC frame is received, syndromes of the MPE-FEC data are generated, where each row (or each codeword) of an MPE-FEC frame corresponds to 64 syndromes, and the syndromes must be generated in an interleaved sequence. The syndromes are utilized to first calculate error locations, and then calculate error values associated with the found error locations. Finally, the MPE-FEC frame data is corrected, by combining the error values and the original frame data according to the error locations.
In the related art, all RS decoding processes are performed by the base-band receiver 120. Once the RS decoding is complete, the error corrected MPE-FEC frame can then be sent to the backend system 140 for further processing. The on-chip memory 130 is typically an SRAM. As the size of an MPE-FEC frame with 1024 rows is 2 Mbits, a large on-chip SRAM is required for de-interleaving the MPE-FEC frame, involving considerable expense.